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The title is quite misleading: the notions "practice" and "ability" here refer to different things: "practice" is taken to mean practicing the creation of music
by dooglius 9y ago
The title is quite misleading: the notions "practice" and "ability" here refer to different things: "practice" is taken to mean practicing the creation of music with an instrument, while "ability" is taken to discriminate between auditory aspects of music one is listening to. I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination.
It's rather unfortunate that the title is so poor, as the paper itself is good aside from that; the study they mention a few times (Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013) found that "more music practice is significantly associated with better music ability" and I'm glad people are going through the effort of checking results like these for causation vs mere correlation.
- tremendulo 9y ago>I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination. Yes, and real musicianship is more complicated still since hearing and playing abilities co-evolve as one cycles round and round a new piece. For example, notes previously played too quietly can be played louder merely by hearing them as louder. At least that's the way I experience it. If true it adds a whole new meaning to 'active listening' since motor activity may be included in the loop.